Sugar Rush
Luxury chocolate is in vogue. As Channel 4 launches a series on the sweet stuff, Nicky Evans reports on the chocoholics and chocolatiers causing a stir closer to home.
In the upstairs room of a Charing Cross pub, twenty people sit expectantly round small tables, eyeing piles of luxurious chocolate -hand-made champagne truffles, fresh raspberry ganaches and dark slabs of rich Incan gold.
These people are self confessed “chocolate nerds”, or more simply the London Chocolate Meet-up group, a club for chocolate lovers. Tonight they a participating in a tasting evening run by chocolate website Seventypercent.com. Of the twenty people here tonight, most are women; about a quarter are men. All profess to be chocoholics. Some come regularly to the meetings to make like-minded friends. Some are first-timers, here to do something different.
Christine Darley who teaches classes in chocolate-making by day prefers the term ‘connoisseur’ to ‘nerd’. She is a chocolate obsessive and and consumes high-quality bars in her spare time. On holiday, she makes a beeline for chocolate attractions, spending hundreds of pounds at a time.
“I spent £300 on chocolates in one weekend last year,” she said. “And I went to Italy recently for a week and spent about £200 on the whole range Domori bars, which I’m now working my way through. There are some fabulous chocolate shops, so you go for it and stock up. We can afford to do it.”
Contrary to appearances, Darley insists her particular vice is not too extravagant. “The chocolate lasts ages. You don’t eat it all at once, you eat two or three pieces every evening. It’s like fine wines and fine cognacs and anything else. You pay for the quality.” Darley is vocal during the actual tasting, interjecting comments on the ‘notes’ the different chocolates offer - from fruit, to tobacco, to nibs, the husks around the cocoa bean. We try fine chocolates from Venezuela, Sweden, Colombia and Spain: we learn about the production process; we compare chocolates of different vintages and taste chili and lime ganaches.
What we do not try is the new chocolate created by Willie Harcourt-Cooze, star of Channel 4’s series on the luxury chocolate movement. But Martin Christy - founder member of the Academy of Chocolate, and co-founder and editor of Seventypercent - has. In fact, he and colleague Steve Chung appear on this week’s programme. They say they have yet to be convinced of the chocolatier’s claim to make “the world’s best chocolate”.
“It’s a very good source, a very good plantation in a good part of Venezuela,” says Christy. “It’s a great product, with good potential. But the results are inconclusive.” Chung explains: “When we tried it he had used it as an ingredient in a cake. You can’t really judge it in that form.”
As the tasters disperse, with the lingering finish of luxury chocolate in their mouths, Chung talks about how his business has changed since luxury chocolate went mainstream. “There’s always been a mix of chocolate lovers and people who just want a night out,” he says. “But it has changed. We do more corporate events now than before.”
Chung admits that, while the people at the tastings are not all well off, those who regularly buy luxury chocolate are generally higher on the economic ladder. “There is an educational and financial filter,” he says. “The difference is that chocolate is more affordable than things like wine which makes it more available to more people.”
Christy is adamant that fine chocolate can be appreciated by people whatever their social class or financial situation. But, when pushed, he adds: “Fine chocolate is like fine wine. Is there a connection between social class and wine? Yes there is.”
Camden Passage, home to Paul A Young Fine Chocolate, is a haven of boutiques aimed at affluent spenders. It being Easter, Young, and artisan chocolatiers like him, are up to their neck in the brown stuff. There are glossy dark eggs waiting to be studded with sugar diamonds, and nests of spun chocolate to be filled with sea-salted caramels. Everything is made by hand and without preservatives, hence the short shelf-life. And long price tag.
The artisans are busy. Establishments originally set up as one-offs are branching out. Paul A Young Fine Chocolates in Camden Passage, winner of Best New Chocolate Shop at the Academy of Chocolate Awards 2005, recently opened a second shop in the City. Chocolate making workshops at My Chocolate, in Farringdon, are now so popular that the company travels to hired venues to cope with demand from larger parties. Further afield, William Curley, named Best British Chocolatier by the Academy, has expanded his business to Mayfair and the John Lewis food hall.
Business is booming. Indeed, trade has been sweet for quite some time. Britons, who consume a quarter of the total chocolate eaten in Europe - a yearly average of ten kilos per person - have woken up and smelt the cocoa, and chocolate has become a serious subject. Consumers’ increased interest in product origin and food ethics extends to chocolate, as evidenced by the rapid growth of the Green & Blacks brand, whose value reached £22.4 million by the time of its sale to Cadbury-Schweppes in 2005.
Now, artisan chocolate has tapped into consumers’ willingness to spend more to obtain higher quality, desirable products. The emergence of this niche market reflects wider economic and social trends. According to Paul Young: “People are at the end of their tethers with supermarkets now. They want something better. There are foodie programmes on TV, chefs like Jamie Oliver promoting good food, and lots of stories in the press. It’s the same with chocolate - people like myself want to make a good, fresh, quality product.”
It seems analysts’ projections last year of growth in the upper échelons of the chocolate market were justified. Reports abound of the commercial success enjoyed by small companies specialising in purer, premium products in an otherwise static chocolate market. Britons, who already spend a collective £4.3 billion on chocolate each year, are consuming more than ever, and will increase their expenditure by six per cent by 2010, according to consumer analyst Datamonitor.
So who is spending this extra money? In PR mode, chocolatiers insist that their boutiques are not just for the rich. They say their customer demographic accurately reflects the British population because their boutiques offer something to suit everyone’s budget. “Everybody comes - every age, every type of person”, says Paul Young. “We have things from £1.50. Everybody can spend that on a bar of Lindt. Our chocolate bars cost £2.75. That’s the price of chocolate in the supermarkets now.”
Miceal McBrian, a chocolatier at My Chocolate, agrees:”Chocolate doesn’t discriminate in any way. It’s not the preserve of the middle classes. It’s about educating the palate.” But scratch the glossy surface of this patter and reality bites: this is high-spec stuff. One hundred grams of fresh mint truffles at William Purley’s will set you back £8. The Easter egg in Young’s Camden Passage window display will set the buyer back £95. At Melt, in Notting Hill, boxes of chocolates reach £100. Shop manager Olivier Traversau comments that that very day a lady had come in to order 500 boxes of chocolates for a wedding - bill, £12,000. It’s enough to make you choke on your Creme Egg.
McBrian does admit that chocolate is upwardly mobile. He says: “Chocolate is moving in the direction that coffee did a few years ago. Before, people just bought instant coffee. Now they look for single-sourced beans from a specific estate with a good reputation for soil type. People are cottoning on to all of those factors with chocolate. It’s become less of a confectionary product and more of a luxury item.”
Certainly, sales at Paul A Young show that posh chocolate is fashionable, and that nowhere is it more favoured than in the indisputable middle-class stronghold - the dinner party. Young says: “Many customers are foodies who want to try something new, something they can’t get anywhere else,” he says. “People get to their mid-30s and don’t want to go to a dinner party and take a bar of Dairy Milk. They like knowing a little bit about chocolate to impress their friends.” And there we have it.
Dinner parties? Keeping up with the Jones’? Is this not the well-trodden domain of the middle classes? Christy warns that consumers wanting to impress will often be sucked in by the price of the chocolate they buy and then be disappointed by the product. He says expensive chocolate does not necessarily mean good quality chocolate, sourced from bean to bar. “By making things more expensive, you make them more desirable,” he says. “There are so many brands where you think you are getting something special [for the price] and you are not. You can get some of the best chocolate in the world for five or six pounds.”
Professor Tim Lang, a world expert in food policy, agrees that when it comes to marketers of niche brands say, chocolate equals luxury, and that is why it sells. “It’s an expensive product. It’s not aimed at poor people,” he says. But with the threat of recession causing Britain to tighten its collective belt, and since economic downturns usually hit small shopkeepers hardest, will the cocoa bubble burst if the economy nosedives? Young doesn’t think so: “Recession isn’t something we worry about too much. We are a country of spenders. At Easter people will still buy an Easter egg. People always have birthdays and anniversaries. Our chocolate is luxury that doesn’t break the bank.
“In a recession people will still spend £4 on a sandwich for their lunch. But they maybe won’t buy a handbag at £3000 or they might stop going to fine dining restaurants. But with our products people don’t feel they are being overly extravagant.”
Traversau agrees: “Recession doesn’t apply to chocolate. It’s very strange but in a recession people still buy it. They will cut other things out but not chocolate. The chemical in it that’s very similar to having sex makes people feel better.”
Both Organic Willie’s posh chocoholics and the recipients of Islington’s most eggstravagant Easter treats must be hoping the chocolatier will not have to eat his words any time soon. Having tasted such luxury, surely they will be reluctant to return to Rolos.
